Well, The Barrow Group has invited me to write another blog and this is it. Although I think I’ve said it all in the first blog, (the contents of which I’ve completely forgotten,) I will share what’s been going on with me and maybe it will resonate with you. In any case, it always feels good to write. And I need somewhere to locate my dwindling self-esteem – why not a blog post?
This summer I have been trying to work out and get my beach body from ten years ago back in about 3 months. I said aloud to a dinner party, “I’m in the best shape of my life.” No one laughed, but no one including me believed it. I am making progress, though. I am, friends, doing my squats.
A few weeks ago I saw my 90-year-old grandmother. She moaned as if in pain and said, “Ooh, Chris, you put on weight.” She slayed a part of my ego that I did not know I had: the assumption that your grandmother thinks you’re in good shape. So I thank her for her assistance on my continuing journey toward ego death as I also continue on my journey to the body of my dreams. Consistency is discipline. This is something a YouTube fitness guy said in a video, and I share it with you now. And I also share this with the members of a class I am teaching at The Barrow Group this fall.
I’m 45. I’m absolutely broke and borderline unemployable. I spend far too much time fighting to make New York City more pedestrian-friendly. I’ve already mentioned my physical fitness journey. I play Nintendo Switch for about 15 minutes every four days. Just painting a portrait here. My grandma says I’m gaining weight. I hang out exclusively with two people whose average age is 5. They treat me in such a way that – in any other scenario – should result in them being arrested. I love them beyond any comprehension. It’s not cool to say that they are my best friends, but that’s the truth of it. I have let many friendships die because I am flaky, and also have enrolled myself in a kind of imprisonment where my children are the wardens, my roommates, my bullies, my posse, and my snitches. Life is getting hard! Who can I turn to? I’m not religious. I love my children, but they know less than me! What’s to be done?
I don’t know, man.
That’s a nice little mantra: I don’t know, man. I was introduced to it by a hero of mine, Hearty White. I can’t even begin to explain who or what he is, or the mystical ways in which he enters my life, but he’s great. Listen to his show called Miracle Nutrition with Hearty White – it’s a podcast, it’s on WFMU. I am supposed to be plugging my class, but here I am plugging Hearty! Anyway, his great wisdom is I Don’t Know, Man. I Don’t Know, Man (aka IDKM) shares a lot of genetic material with The Beginner’s Mind, and The Don’t-Know Mind: a Zen goal of total emptiness and openness.
In the class I’m advertising via this blog we do some drawing. I’m giving such a central secret to the class away by telling you this, but I’m desperate for sign-ups! Anyway, Lynda Barry (whose exercises I steal) says “There is the drawing you have in your head, and there is the drawing that is being made and you can’t see it until you forget what you were trying to do.” And I think forgetting what you were trying to do is a mountainish morsel of wisdom for the human experience.
A small example from my own life: many of the best things I’ve ever cooked were the result of me forgetting I was even cooking at all – I don’t mean that I was “in the zone” or “in flow” – I literally forgot that I was cooking. I was just in the other room, listening to music, or reading my phone, or staring in the mirror when, in a sudden flash of remembering, I raced into the kitchen to discover that what I was cooking (but forgot about) was cooked perfectly because I forgot I was cooking it in the first place. Apropos of this: I’ve had some rare personal success with auditioning lately. And I’d basically taken myself out of the auditioning game, then Whoosh “I don’t know, man!” Things happen.
Not knowing, man is the honest truth of everything – call it The Tao or the cosmic force or the Holy Spirit. I don’t think I have to prove this assertion – not in a blog, not in THIS blog! So I won’t.
Something I tell my daughter: “As much as I love you and know you, there are parts of you that I don’t know and will never know. And I love those parts, too. And as much as you love and know me, there are parts about me that you will never know.” I suspect that this is true for each of us, that there are parts of ourselves that we do not, and may never know. Right now, typing this, I feel a wave of sadness in response to the thought. At other times I’ve felt this is a lovely feeling, a comfort. The limitless and unknowable universe lives within each of us, and why shouldn’t it!?!
I Don’t Know, Man is also about being so overwhelmed with life that you have no other option but to let it go (huge shoutout to Lee Brock) and get washed away with all your hopes and plans and self-esteem and you go down the drain. Overwhelm is another pillar of this class. In extreme time crunches there’s no space for worrying about quality. Finishing is paramount. And in our efforts to merely finish without the opportunity to worry something to death, something totally us – naked and completely original – comes through. It’s rarely what we planned or wanted or thought it should look like. And, therefore, it’s profoundly vivid and unique.
What I am trying to tell you is to come check out my class, yes, obviously, I’m desperate. But aside from that, to forget about some – oh! Forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in!
Leonard Cohen FTW again and again.
It’s not important why, but I was listening to a lot of Ram Dass and Jack Kornfield, and Jack K was telling a story about a Rabbi that explained spiritual teachings as laying lessons on the heart, not in the heart, because you cannot get in the heart in normal circumstances. You lay these things on the heart, so that when the heart breaks, these lessons fall in.
I Don’t Know, Man involves heartbreak, too. The unanticipated or unexpected or unforeseen. The unimaginable. If we let the mystery, the darkness, the confusion of life fall into us when we are broken, we become, I offer to you, part of the truth as best as we can attempt to understand it. Something we could not have aimed for or wanted to be. I guess, I Don’t Know, Man leads to a deep and timeless knowing. Am I talking about wisdom? I possibly might be.
Well, I’m creeping myself out, so I’ll wrap it up. I just read last year’s blog and I must say this one blows that one out of the water. A radical reinvention of last year’s blog. You’re in for a treat, or, you’ve just been treated to a treat. I will see you in class or, in another year, god willing, for my blog about that, then. Thank you for reading, if you have.
My blog for the year is done and I recede into the rough embrace of the hedges like Homer, or into the poetic darkness of the ancient world like Homer, or into the welcoming roar of the bleachers like a homer.
– Chris
Upcoming classes with Chris include the Short Film Creation Workshop starting 9/16. Apply and grab your spot now!
Check out TBG’s full schedule of classes, including youth options!